Spring 2025 Edgar Fellows Course Offerings

S/HONR 203: Honors Seminar in the Social Sciences: The Musical

Professor Steven Kirsh (Psychology Department)

Course Description

Students will evaluate Broadway, television, and movie musicals using contemporary social science theory and research. The course will focus on: 1) the identification of psychological, sociological, and anthropological concepts depicted in musicals; and 2) the accuracy of those portrayals. For each class period, students will evaluate a social science article and a paired musical.

F/CAI/DEI/HONR 204: Honors Seminar in the Fine Arts: Psyche, Mental Illness and Musical Creativity

Professor Beata Golec (Music Department)

This offering will discusses the influence of psychiatric disorders on the musical creativity of composers throughout history. Topics will include a survey of the influence of depression, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive manic disorders on the composer’s personality, and how these characteristics became inherent in the compositional process and final product. We will evaluate composers’ creativity, their impulses to flout established rules of harmony and structure, and reasons for their being considered ahead of their times. Exemplar creative work of several major composers will provide a phenomenological perspective and will allow us to consider aesthetic experiences. 

*This course satisfies both the Creativity and Innovation (CAI) credit and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) GLOBE attribute credit.

DEI/WCV/HONR 207: Honors Seminar in Diversity, Difference, and Pluralism: (Mis)Representations of Native American Identities

Professor Jonathan Auyer (Philosophy Department)

When you think about representations of Native Americans, what comes to mind? Do these representations accurately portray the identities of Native peoples or do they contain (and perpetuate) harmful stereotypes? This course includes two aims: it will look at the many ways that Native Americans and Indigenous peoples have been represented across in a range of media (by having students view and read fiction and nonfiction media representations of Native Americans); it will also investigate the impact of those (mis)representations on Native American and Indigenous identities (by having students read both non-scholarly and scholarly texts  (in philosophy and Native American studies) addressing the harmful portrayals of Native American stereotypes  as well as the structures and systems that perpetuate them.

*This course satisfies both the World Cultures and Values (WCV) credit and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) GLOBE attribute credit.

Please note: the Edgar Fellows Program will sunset in 2027 and is no longer accepting new students. SUNY Geneseo offers all students a distinctive honors college learning experience.